“It is from——” and she said no more.
But Deadshot Dean recognized by her look of significance that she could only mean her brother, then a condemned prisoner at the fort. She nerved herself to break the seal, and asked:
“Is there an answer?”
“I was told that there was, miss.”
At this the miner stepped out of the coach, and left her to read the letter alone, for he saw that she was deeply affected.
While the miner, the courier, and the stage-coach driver were talking together, she read the letter. It was written in cipher, and she said:
“It is the alphabet which my poor brother taught me to write when I was a very little girl. He felt that I would remember it, and has written something he dared not let any other eye see, I suppose. Oh, if it should be an appeal to me to save him!”
She dashed the tears from her eyes, and nerved herself to read the letter which she seemed to dread so much. It was as follows:
“My Darling Sister: Do you remember away back when you were a little girl of ten, and I was dismissed from the navy, that you said, when father and mother were cold toward me, that you would never desert me?
“Do you recall again, when I came home from Germany, dismissed from the university on account of the fatal duel I fought, you again were my little comforter?